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Tag: lesbophobia

Owen Jones has only recently written his first article on transgenderism. Despite claiming to think transphobia is hateful, Owen Jones was so shocked by a lesbian woman asking him when he last preformed cunnilingus that he tweeted this:

Keeping in mind here that lesbian women are consistently called transphobic for refusing to have sex with pre-operative transwomen. Many feminists, including heterosexual and bisexual women, who find the term ‘cotton ceiling’ – which was coined by transwomen to discuss why lesbian women were refusing to have sex with them – distressing are regularly told that its transphobic to say anything remotely critical about the term. Transwomen are women, even if they have a penis, and lesbian women are transphobic for refusing to have sex with transwomen.

I watched Owen Jones twitter feed after he posted this tweet and I only saw a few lesbian women asking why it didn’t count as transphobic since transmen have vulvas. Had a lesbian woman said ‘giving blow jobs’ wasn’t lesbian sex, their mentions would have been full of people calling them transphobic, threats of violence and wishes that they die.

Why is it transphobic for a lesbian woman to not want to have sex with a pre-op transwoman, but it’s completely fine for Owen Jones to refuse to have sex with a pre-op transman? Why is Owen Jones allowed to say that gay men do not preform cunnilingus when lesbians get death threats for saying that lesbian women don’t give blowjobs?

If it constitutes transphobia for lesbian women to refuse to have sex with transwomen, then Owen Jones is transphobic by being horrified at the thought of performing cunnilingus. If the first is transphobic, and Jones isn’t, well, that says a whole lot about the misogyny of the people spouting this level of hypocrisy. Either they are both transphobic or neither is transphobic. They both cannot be true.

This is a very interesting speech given by activist Julie Bindel at FemiFest 2014 about the women’s liberation movement, lesbian liberation movement and the failure of the mainstream gay rights movement to support lesbian women.